My favorite commercial right now is a beautifully simple spot, that visits a series of sleepy environments in the earliest hours of the morning. There’s a brief, plainspoken narration — a voice who implores the viewer to go looking for something that’s been lost. And it all ends with the camera focused on a lone runner in a suburban neighborhood. Across this scene are the words, “Find Your Momentum.” It’s arguably the most powerful 30 seconds on television these days. Why? Because it so elegantly expresses the heart of the Kaiser Permanente brand.

The whole campaign is brilliantly simple. And as a tagline, “Thrive” continues to inform every creative execution and, I would venture, every strategic marketing decision. If I remember correctly, the initial TV spots ended with a longer line, “Live well, Be well, and Thrive,” but it’s the more succinct, and ultimately more powerful, “Thrive” that is positioning the organization as a visionary healthcare provider. And it’s a very compelling rallying cry.

In a recent press release, SVP of Marketing and Internet Services, Christine Paige said that with its three newest ads, “Kaiser Permanente aspires to provide the inspiration, motivation, and tools needed for individuals, families, and communities to take their health to the next level.” In other words, Kaiser wants everyone to thrive. It’s not an advertising idea — it’s an idea worth advertising.

Thrive was first launched in 2004, and it has yielded a long string of smart advertising, including — of course — this latest ad. Sure, it helps to have a partner like Campbell Ewald creating great concepts, and a phenomenal voice-over like Allison Janney (you might remember her as C.J. Cregg on the The West Wing), but at the end of the day, it’s Kaiser Permanente who gets the credit for transforming a one-word tagline into a corporate mantra, and continuing to find new ways to demonstrate how Kaiser’s perspective is singular and meaningful.

Martin Lindstrom's bestseller, Brandwashed.

You might not expect anyone in my position to ever recommend a scathing exposé on branding, but Martin Lindstrom’s latest bestseller, Brandwashed, is one of the most fascinating books I’ve read all year. In 255 pages (that go by all too fast), Lindstrom explains how today’s brands employ a remarkable range of psychological traps “to obscure the truth, manipulate our minds, and persuade us to buy.”

Lindstrom has been in the business for a very long while; his first job was with Lego, helping to develop new product lines at the early age of 13.  He’s advised some of the largest global organizations on how to build their brands and, grow marketshare. Lindstrom spent a vast amount of time behind closed doors with CEOs, brand managers, and research directors learning the darkest secrets of the world’s most powerful marketers. Now, as consumer advocate, he’s revealing many of them, and answering questions we’d have never thought to ask:

Why is lip balm so addictive? There’s an eye-opening story of highly-addictive ingredients, and, an “inactive” ingredient one manufacturer has been using for decades to erode our lips so we’ll keep buying more. Did your most recent shopping trip make you think you’re losing weight? Lindstrom lets you in on “vanity sizing”, a new pitfall that makes consumers think they’ve gone down a pant size. And, what about your weekly trip to the grocery store — do you find you spend more in some stores than others? Learn about data that proves shoppers who enter a store with a right-side entrance, and then move counterclockwise through the store spend more money than those who enter stores from the left and do their shopping in the other direction.

If you’re in marketing, this is a must-read. How else are you going to find out how sex sells, what makes celebrities such powerful persuaders, and, why a royal family needs brand strategists.

I am about to divulge the secret to complete and utter happiness in life. And you’ll be pleased to know it’s absolutely free. What’s more, anyone can be happy — you don’t have to be brilliant, highly creative, rich, or even beautiful. All you have to do is be good at one thing: managing expectations.

Sounds silly, but that’s it. That’s the secret. Managing expectations is everything. It’s the simple, bullet-proof solution for a happy personal life and a successful professional career. Here’s why: If you can set clear expectations and then deliver on them, you’ll be loved by all. Don’t believe me?

Think about your significant other. Do you know what your special someone expects of you? Have you ever asked? Chances are, no. And that’s why you run into to trouble from time to time. Take it from a guy who’s been married for 20 years, the moment you learn what your better half wants and needs from you is the magical moment you can start to manage expectations. She’s happy. You’re happy. Let’s move on to your job.

Managing expectations at work is often a little easier. Your wife probably won’t give you an annual performance review. Your boss, however, will. And if not, you should walk right in and talk about it. See what happens when you tell your boss you want to know what you can do to make him happy. Same goes for your co-workers. Find out what they expect of you. Or better yet, let them know what they should expect of you — and by the way, make sure you set expectations you can meet, and even exceed. Be honest about what you can do and how you can do it. If you over-promise, you’ll quickly disappoint. You may even lose some of the respect you’ve worked so hard to establish. In a nutshell, no one will be happy.

So now that you’re thinking through this whole business of managing expectations, let’s talk about your customers. They have considerable wants and needs. And it’s up to you, as an organization, to address them. So how do you do it? Well, you take everything you’ve just learned about your personal relationships, and apply it to the hundreds, thousands, or millions of people who will ever use your products or services. Only in this case, we’re not going to call it managing expectations. We’re going to call it managing your brand — because that’s exactly what it is.

Brand management is asking customers what’s important to them. It’s about starting conversations, listening closely, and then setting expectations, careful not to overpromise, or underwhelm.

The best brands don’t talk about themselves, they talk about their customers’ needs. They keep the conversation going, and develop new products and services accordingly. And all the while, they are simply managing expectations — and often exceeding them.

So there you have it. That’s the secret. And my hope for you is that you’ll get really good at this one thing — and in doing so, get really good at being happy.

“When you are born with ginger hair, and grow up as the son of a military man — praise is a strictly rationed commodity. So it meant a huge amount to me when you embraced Boden and ordered lots of colourful clothes.”

That’s the opening line on one of the best letters I’ve ever seen from a retailer. Most of the time, these kinds of notes are crafted with all the passion and thoughtfulness of a takeaway menu. Companies regularly miss the opportunity to enrich their story and elevate the brand.

Truthfully, my wife would continue to order from Boden even if she hadn’t gotten this letter. But in the past few weeks, I’ve heard her tell several friends about the note — friends who might never have considered Boden. With one brilliantly written letter, Johnnie Boden has cemented a customer relationship and sparked interest in potential shoppers. One refreshingly genuine bit of copy is enhancing the entire Boden brand experience.

The letter ends just as wonderfully as it begins: “Being a British male, I’m obviously not terribly good at expressing my feelings. But with a slightly quivering upper lip, I’d like to say how grateful I am for your unwavering support.” How’s that for a window into the soul of the company?

Michael Eisner once said that a brand is a living entity, enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures. This letter was one of those small gestures — small but highly impactful.

I think most people would agree that a brand is someone’s gut feeling about an organization, or company. In other words, it’s intangible, individual, and very personal. That’s why managing a brand is so tricky: it’s really managing expectations. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the reaction to Gap’s new logo was so overwhelmingly negative.

Millions of consumers have adopted Gap as an essential facet of their own personal brands. And it reflects more on them than it does the company. It’s like the old maxim, “Your brand doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to your customers.” That’s not to say that the company doesn’t have the right to change, or evolve the logo, but there has to be a really good reason.

Over the past week or so, as the company was responding to the overwhelming criticism, one Gap executive noted that the company is changing, and management was hoping the new logo would represent that change. But what is that change? And shouldn’t that change have been perceptible to consumers before Gap made any effort to reflect it?

Gap’s new logo failed because there appears to have been no real rationale for it. I imagine the lousy economy and decreased sales might have been the catalysts, but even these don’t support sweeping changes to the most significant visual expression of a major consumer brand.

In the end, this entire ordeal will serve as a cautionary tale for other brands, and a proof point for anyone seeking to illustrate the power of social media. But for now, we can only scratch our heads and wonder what Gap was thinking. If the short-lived logo represented anything, it conveyed a sense of uncertainty, carelessness and frustration — all of which is painfully revealing for a retail company that has seen better days.

It was about two years ago when I finally created my own facebook page, but I remember the words of our youngest designers like it was yesterday.

“Oh no, you’re on facebook? You old people are going to ruin it for everyone.”

I should note that I was about 43 years old at the time, so the use of term “you old people” was, in my own estimation, particularly harsh.

Flash forward to three weeks ago when I was out Christmas shopping with my family. As I was standing in line at Nordstrom, I overheard the following conversation between two octogenarians.

“He keeps posting things on my page and I don’t want him to that.”

“My grandson showed me how to de-friend someone. May be you should de-friend him.”

“No, that sounds really awful. I don’t want to hurt his feelings. I just want him to stop writing things all over my wall.”

It was not until then that I fully comprehended the reaction of my young associate so many months before. Like him, I suddenly felt like facebook was a lot less cool. I had walked away from it months ago because I got tired of being harassed by people I had barely known in high school who wanted to “see what I was up to”. But in that instant, I was relieved to have nothing to do with that brand. It belonged to another generation. It just didn’t fit me anymore.

I mention all this because brands are so very important to us as individuals. It sounds superficial, but we are — in many ways — defined by the brands we value and revere. We choose car brands that express our practicality, (or lack thereof). We choose cellphone brands that express our techiness. And we choose shoe brands that express our sense of style. We even aspire to brands we hope will express our future economic, intellectual, or social status.

We are living, breathing collections of brands. And when one doesn’t fit us anymore — when it doesn’t match our beliefs and our mindsets — we lose it.

At Grafik, we’re forever telling clients it’s not about them, and we mean it. A brand has nothing to do with what a group of executives think it should be, and everything to do with what customers or users need it to be. A brand is the emotional trigger for virtually every transaction. And although a company can’t always determine what portion of the population will embrace their brand, they can certainly foster relationships with the audiences that present the greatest opportunity.

The folks at facebook are doing just fine without me for now (Check out the exponential growth at http://www.quantcast.com/facebook.com). Eventually, I’ll have to go back because as a marketer I need to know what it offers my clients. In the meanwhile, I’m on Twitter. It fits me better.

How do you get prospects to sit up and take notice? If you’re Software AG, you send an iPod Touch loaded with special video content in a custom box. As you might expect, response has been pretty phenomenal. In a report delivered last week, our client cited a response rate of 23% — but that number is still growing. And all this means that dollars signs will soon follow.

Of course, you’re probably thinking this extraordinary effort had an extraordinary price tag. And you’d be wrong. The cost was absolutely appropriate for the task, which was to get meetings with a select group of hard-to-reach C-level decision-makers — executives surrounded by gatekeepers. Software AG was successful because they understand customers’ lifetime value. They know the cost of an iPod is nothing compared to the overall worth of a new client. And with that knowledge, they asked us to develop a campaign delivering a pointed message that clearly articulated how Software AG could change the way prospects do business.

Thanks, Software AG for being a great client. And a great marketer.

Let’s say someone gives you a list of ingredients: no measures, no instructions, not even a clue as to what the ingredients should combine to make. It’s an absurd notion, and yet branding firms do it all the time.

For the third or fourth time in as many months, Grafik has been asked by organizations to try and make heads or tails of strategic documents delivered to them by firms who were happy to drop a stack of research on their doorsteps and dash. In each case, there were no real conclusions, and absolutely no hint of what the organization’s brand focus should be.

As far as I’m concerned that’s less than half the job.

Before you can begin to express a brand, everyone needs to agree on a concise recipe — a directive that identifies the key components, weighs their significance, and details how they need to come together. This is a critical step. One you can’t skip because it informs imagery and messaging, ensures relevancy, and helps define tactics across every customer touch point.

We have a couple of branding projects in the works now, and you can bet that when they’re launched, these brands will be fully baked. The way we see it you shouldn’t have to settle eggs and flour, when you’re in the market for cake.

My six-year old dragged me out of bed on Saturday to make him pancakes, and when we got to the kitchen he noticed I wasn’t wearing my glasses. He looked at me kind of quizzically and said, “Dad, can you even see anything without your glasses?”
“Sure,” I told him, “Everything is just a little fuzzy.”
“Everything?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“Well what about stuff that’s fuzzy to start with?”

It was a pretty good question, I thought. It reminded of several companies I’ve worked with over the years — companies that came to Grafik because their brands weren’t as clearly defined as they could have been.  Consequently, everything seemed hopelessly unfocused.

A semiconductor firm. A social networking site. A real estate developer. In every case, we were able to help these companies develop powerful brands that define their core value externally, as well as internally. We pinpointed what’s central to what they do, and why they do it, so their brand now informs operations and management as much as they marketing and corporate communications.

For these clients and several others, we made all decision-making less fuzzy. Because when it gets right down to it, that’s what branding should do.

It’s not often you have a great client who always lets you do great work. But the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) has provided numerous opportunities for Grafik to do just that. Penny Murphy and Amanda Hall are extraordinary partners in that they consistently bring us in on projects where we can offer strategic insight and flex our creative muscles. They’re wonderful to work with because they value our perspective and really appreciate our work.

Recently, we helped them develop print ads showcasing both the value of specialist care, and the need for tort reform. The two sample ads shown here are just a few of the pieces we created. We hope to extend these campaigns soon, but right now we’re busy helping ACOG launch a microsite for their new online publication, pause magazine. I’ll have more to say about that in coming weeks, but for now I just wanted to say thanks to Penny, Amanda and Adam (the latest addition to the team) for making my job easier — and a heck of a lot more rewarding.

Cheers to good work and good clients.